The API score didn’t give any information about other measures of student success, or about the climate at the school, all of which matter to parents and the real estate agents using the information to market houses to them.

In January, California’s State Board of Education finalized the key elements of a new school accountability system, although some details will still be worked out over the coming year. It’s called the California School Dashboard, a website where the public will be able to get a number of metrics on a school’s or a district’s performance.

The dashboard will be available online at CASchoolDashboard.org, although until Wednesday, when it’s scheduled to go live, it’s just a blank page.

“The API was an overly narrow and simplistic way of measuring” school success, said Joshua Daniels, spokesman for the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, which advises and assists school districts, county superintendents of schools and charter schools. Part of its role is to train educators on how to use and interpret the dashboard.

In with the new

Beyond looking at students’ performance in English language arts and mathematics, the new dashboard includes measures of chronic absenteeism at a school, suspension rate, the progress students who don’t speak English at home made in learning English, graduation rate, what the school does to prepare students for colleges and careers, and more.

“You have multiple indicators on a dashboard, and some of them you look at more than others,” Daniels said. “The great thing about the system is it doesn’t force parents to look at one indicator. It allows parents to look at what’s important to them.”

Elliott Duchon, Jurupa Unified School District superintendent, said it’s important to include measures such as graduation and suspension rates and English learners’ progress.

“Sometimes we find students who achieve well aren’t always successful. We need to look at other things, (like) how are they doing emotionally,” Duchon said.

For example, chronic absenteeism is a problem in schools across California. An estimated 210,000 kindergarten through fifth-grade students in the state missed 10 percent of the 2015-16 school year. Seven percent of elementary students are chronically absent, according to a 2016 report issued by the California Department of Justice.

That costs schools funding, because schools are paid in large part based on their average daily attendance. Those students also tend to fall behind, do poorly on tests and are at a higher risk of dropping out and getting involved in the criminal justice system.

Suspended students are twice as likely to drop out and three times as likely to enter the criminal justice system, according to experts.

Students whose speak Spanish or another language continue to struggle academically, state data show. English learners scored lower than other students on the 2016 California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress. They also trail in graduation rates, college admission and other categories. More than one in five California students — almost 1.4 million pupils — is an English learner. Their performance is tracked as part of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaced the No Child Left Behind law.

Color-coded

And in perhaps the biggest break from the single-number API score era, the scores in each category on the dashboard aren’t static numbers but color codes, reflecting how the score has changed over time. Scores are also given as pie charts, for color-blind users, with five pieces of pie being the best.

A score that’s shown significant improvements gets a better color code than one that’s been stagnant or one that’s in decline. The five-point scale goes from red, the worst, through orange, yellow, green and blue, the best.

“You may be getting a yellow, but upon further investigation, you might be comfortable with that,” Daniels said. “Even if you get a blue or a green, you may not be happy with that: You’ve got to understand why that is.”

Overall, he said, the new system might be confusing to Californians at first, but says it’s a definite improvement over what came before.

Beau Yarbrough wrote his first newspaper article taking on an authority figure (his middle school principal) when he was in 7th grade. He’s been a professional journalist since 1992, working in Virginia, Egypt and California. In that time, he’s covered community news, features, politics, local government, education, the comic book industry and more. He’s covered the war in Bosnia, interviewed presidential candidates, written theatrical reviews, attended a seance, ridden in a blimp and interviewed both Batman and Wonder Woman (Adam West and Lynda Carter). He also cooks a mean pot of chili.